There's merit in that. It seems like the WHO were indeed initially too worried about stepping on China's toes (including a pathetic display where rather than even mention the name 'Taiwan' in an interview with a Taiwanese reporter, one of their senior advisors simply terminated the call - after pretending not to hear her) - a stance exacerbated by China's own cagey initial response to the outbreak, which included denying entry to WHO teams in mid-Jan.

Not that it would have mattered that much insofar as Trump repeatedly ignored the WHO even after the latter got their act together. Whatever the case, Trump's attack on the WHO has nothing to do with merit - as if anything he does is - and everything to do with looking for a scapegoat in order to better shift blame from Mr. I'm-Not-Reponsible-For-Anything-At-All.

Well, now China can step in to the funding void Trump created. So cowing to them was quite forward thinking.

Also, Obama is a war criminal who, like the current administration, served the interests of the rich and powerful - his shameful bailouts being repeated today - and an otherwise small-visioned politician whose crowning achivement was not to rock the neoliberal boat.

On leaks, arguably illegal. — tim wood

The legality of the acts is not the issue. The issue is whether some people who supported him disliked these activities.

But you aver there were "a significant number of things" he did, — tim wood

He applied the espionage act numerous times against whistleblowers.

But you slide in weasel-like and with your rhetorical microscope find and without any accuracy at all proclaim the mote you find in his eye, overlooking the whole faggot in your own. — tim wood

I happen to know two completely unacquainted people who cited this as something they did not like about Obama, people who otherwise liked him.

To my way of thinking it all falls under the Big Lie. I'm calling you a Big Liar - not a good thing. Show me wrong. — tim wood

What's there to show? Either you believe me that he turned off otherwise friendly faces with these actions, or you don't. If you don't believe me, I really don't care.

How far back do we have to go to find a president who was not a war criminal? And why is that?

They are a vicious, ignorant, and sentimental folk. Just like us. — unenlightened

I dunno, I'm not super well versed in the American presidency. They probably all are, given that America has always been an imperial warmongering nation.

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How far back do we have to go to find a president who was not a war criminal? — Banno

Hoover.

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Get [####] you piece of [####]

Accuse me of racism again on the basis of a post that has nothing to do with race and I will [##############]

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Agreed. The capacity of WHO is very limited. Individual governments shouldn’t rely only on one source when it comes to such a crisis - and many didn’t.

Nah [#####]. You don't get to accuse someone of racism on no basis and then pretend you want to have a level conversion. [######]

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Carter? Who at every turn did what he could to undermine the Sandinistas and pave the way for the Contras and their murderous regime? (Cemented by Reagan of course). Worth mentioning that Cater literally committed a war crime when flying Nicaraguan National Guard (who eventually become the Contras) out of the country under the banner of the Red Cross. The same Carter who effectively created the Mujahadeen which eventually became Al Qaeda and further along, ISIS? The same Carter who materially and financially assisted Sukarno as he slaughtered civilians in East Timor? Nah, Carter was a prick like the rest of them.

Lecture me about knowing my history. Wanker.

Ah, so you don't know how international law works.

And in case anyone had any doubt about the small-minded anemia of the Obama administration:

"To his most hopeful followers, Obama’s unique gift was being able to turn soaring statements of principle into simple truths of politics, marrying a national inheritance of social movements from below to a plainspoken pragmatism from above. There was something to that view, but it never reckoned with the fact that Obama’s radicalism was, from the very beginning, bound up with a narrow notion of what politics was about. His was a vision less of power than of process, the culmination of twenty years of political theory journals where democracy was deliberation and deliberation was democracy. Lincoln, Roosevelt, and Reagan won election by promising to crush a systemic social malignancy: the slaveocracy, economic royalists, a parasitic class of liberal elites. Unlike these transformative presidents of left and right, Obama disavowed any structural transformations of society or the economy. Even when it came to race, as Obama’s most electrifying speech (on Jeremiah Wright) made clear, his vision of change was almost completely divorced from the social bases of power. His goal was to help both sides understand each other, to make our conversations better.

... As men and women watched their life savings go up in smoke and their homes disappear into foreclosure, Obama hailed the “power” of the market, declaring in his first inaugural address that capitalism’s capacity “to generate wealth and expand freedom” was “unmatched.” Encouraging free enterprise and rewarding individual initiative, he said in his 2013 State of the Union address, was the “unfinished task” of government. That was the positive vision. Just as often, he was reminding the left and reassuring the right of his belief in the limitations of government. Even as he affirmed his commitment to enforcing federal laws against discrimination, he was convinced “that a transformation of conscience and a genuine commitment to diversity on the part of the nation’s CEOs could bring about quicker results than a battalion of lawyers.” His famous phrase, “Hard things are hard,” which was made into a plaque he kept on his desk, was not a reference to the Affordable Care Act, as is commonly believed. According to top strategist David Axelrod, it was a reference to entitlement cuts, to Obama’s genuine desire to impose some kind of austerity on Social Security and Medicare in return for a deal with the Republicans on taxes and the debt. Thankfully, the Republicans refused it.

... Obama’s public philosophy: a moral minimalism that rendered him not so much ill-prepared for a fight with the Republicans as ideologically indisposed to the very idea of a fight. “Yes we can” was a sonorous but empty phrase: yes we can what? When Obama got concrete, he might stay in that register of grandness—there was that moment when the rise of the oceans would begin to slow, and so on—but more often than not he opted for unapologetic avowals of smallness. “The true genius of America,” he told the DNC in 2004, is “an insistence on small miracles; that we can tuck in our children at night and know that they are fed and clothed and safe from harm.” No one-off, that turn to the slight but simple truth of children being safe was a recurring theme of Obama’s presidency, arguably its epistemological ground. “There’s only one thing we can be sure of,” he said after Sandy Hook, “and that is the love that we have for our children. . . . The warmth of a small child’s embrace, that is true.” These were not just comforting words to a grief-stricken nation. They emanated from the idiom of bare life, the wariness of deep foundations that had come to characterize liberalism in the wake of the New Deal order and the end of the Cold War.

In retrospect, it seems obvious that such a smallness of vision could never withstand the largeness of the right. But, for Obama, opposing largeness with smallness was the point. In this age of Trump and Twitter, it’s easy to forget the exhaustion of the electorate after the foreign wars of Bush and the domestic wars of Rove. Obama was keenly attuned to it. Rather than depict the Republicans as revanchists, he chose to describe them as irresponsible and grandiose, reckless adventurers who fought extravagant wars they didn’t pay for and squandered a surplus they hadn’t earned. Theirs was a “politics of anything goes,” he said, a bacchanal of waste and war. They were dangerous and dumb and out of control; he was safe and smart and in control. After eight years of operatic conflict, the last thing Americans wanted was more. What they wanted was less. That’s what Obama promised them—action that was “imperfect,” victories that were “partial”—and no amount of Republican wilding would stop him from keeping that promise. Even if it meant the peace of a graveyard, the quiet of a tomb."

https://www.dissentmagazine.org/article/the-obamanauts

Obama was a corporate tool and continued Bush's warmongering foreign policy. Street is right about Carter too. There is zero racial context to that. I mean you think we don't like Trump because he's orange?

I've said it before, but you are as misguided about Dems as Repubs are about Trump. The Dems and the Repubs are competing vendors in a political market where the product is political favors and the customers are monied interests. Obama previously won this competition for corporate money, hence his two election victories. Now the Repubs are back in the mix. The most egregious examples of this competition being the bailouts. Because Obama was cool and charming and had the Dem label plastered on his butt changes none of that.

What's the point of all of this? All I see is a pathetic attempt to validate Trump by besmirching anything and everything else, just like Trump. — tim wood

No. It's you utter inability to understand that people can be critical of BOTH Trump AND the Democrats.

If you see that being critical about Obama / Bush is validating Trump, it is simply absurd. It's the common stupidity in juxtapositioning everything. It's genuinely all that you see.

Besides, I think that a President that gives an order to kill an under aged American citizen just because his father (also an American citizen) was a spokesperson for Al Qaeda (after being tortured in an Egyptian prison) is something to be critical about. And as the President has made the decision himself after Bush (as the CIA and the Armed Forces obviously wanted a 'free from jail card' for the extrajudicial killings), it can be said it's his decision. But that doesn't validate Trump at all. He is a weak, inept and likely extremely corrupt leader.

The fact that people opposed Bush in his extrajudicial and secret operations during "The War on Terror" is understandable, but that the same people then fell silent when Obama continued many of the same practices just show how these people had nothing else but partisan politics in their mind.

But for sheer petty-minded vindictive nastiness, no one can beat the current administration.

https://morningstaronline.co.uk/article/w/us-blocks-sale-ventilators-cuba-after-acquiring-medical-companies?fbclid=IwAR0F6xenKKXw1JMFR_9GLmiRtPQWmqrl9buOwzbnmQ4CGeQe1LYif3Cm5JY#.XpqlAEYopjo.facebook

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If Trump and Obama are symptoms of a rigged system then your question misses the point. Trump can only be the douche he is because of the Republican support in Congress.

It's not so much the President that's the problem. You could elect Karl Marx president and it wouldn't make a huge difference.

[Cross posted.]

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Get money out of politics and edit the Senate out of your constitution. You might have a chance then.

The fact that people opposed Bush in his extrajudicial and secret operations during "The War on Terror" is understandable, but that the same people then fell silent when Obama continued many of the same practices just show how these people had nothing else but partisan politics in their mind. — ssu

Yep. Both sides do that to the point that my eyes glaze over at any criticism, which might be bad if I weren't a nihilist.

Did you know that horror generated by evil kings is an expression of the divine child archetype? The evil king (Herod) is the shadow if the divine child (Jesus).

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Did you know that horror generated by evil kings is an expression of the divine child archetype? The evil king (Herod) is the shadow if the divine child (Jesus). — frank

Snipped for the scrapbook.

Do people think trump is going to win the re election?